Dr. Halima Mouhib is Associate Professor and co-head of the Bioinformatics group in the Computer Science department of the VU Amsterdam.
During her PhD, she specialized in the characterization of bioactive compounds at the RWTH Aachen University in Germany and subsequently expanded her research focus towards structural bioinformatics through an EMBO and Theodore-von-Kármán fellowship to study protein unfolding. In 2019, she obtained her habilitation at the University Paris-Est and was awarded the Descartes-Huygens award 2020 by the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, to study how odorants are absorbed from the gas-phase through binding proteins to mimic the absorption of fragrances in the nose.
Since 2021, she has been an honorary junior member of the Institut Universitaire Francais.
At the VU, one of her main research focuses is to elucidate and quantify molecular mechanisms of complex biological processes using advanced computational techniques. Her NWO project “ODORWISE” applies multi-scale computational methods ranging from quantum chemistry benchmarks to enhanced molecular dynamics sampling techniques and machine learning to characterize odorant binding proteins and their potential for applications in artificial noses.
She is the main organizer of the AI4Biomed series on Campus and actively involved in the Amsterdam Institute of Molecular and Life Sciences.
